Strategy in Education - A Conversation with Roger L. Martin

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

Winning means finding a place where you're going to deliver exceptional value, which encourages other people to find other places to create exceptional value. It doesn't mean crushing other people, it means encouraging dispersion. And when you encourage a dispersion of where to play, how to win, customers do better.

Hi, and welcome back to another episode of the Future Learning Design Podcast. My name is Tim Logan, and the podcast is brought to you in partnership with Notosh. In this week's episode, Euan McIntosh, CEO and founder of Notosh, joins me to talk to Roger L. Martin on the role of strategy and business in education. In 2017, Roger was named the world's number one management thinker by Thinkers50, a biannual ranking of the most influential global business thinkers. He's a trusted strategy advisor to the CEOs of companies worldwide, including Procter Gamble, Lego, and Ford. Roger is a professor emeritus at the Rotman School of Management at University of Toronto, where he served as dean from 1998 to 2013. His previous roles have been academic director of the Michael Lee-Chin Family Institute for Corporate Citizenship and the institute director of the Martin Prosperity Institute. Roger's newest book is A New Way to Think: Your Guide to Superior Managerial Effectiveness. And his previous 12 books include When More Is Not Better, Creating Great Choices, written with Jennifer Real in 2017, Getting Beyond Better, written with Sally Osberg in 2015, and Playing to Win, written with A.G. Lafley from 2013, which won the award for best book of 2012-13 by the Thinkers50. Roger received his BA from Harvard College with a concentration in economics in 1979 and his MBA from the Harvard Business School in 1981.

Hey, Roger.

Hey guys, how are you?

Hey, good morning.

Yes, good to see you.

Great stuff. We're super excited to be able to talk to you. Thank you so much firstly for joining and also just to say, Notosh as a company, we've really been inspired by a lot of your ideas around strategy and social entrepreneurship and design thinking. So there's a whole bunch of history there that we— it'd be interesting, it may pop up. In the conversation and as colleagues in Notoch, Euan and I. So we're, you know, we're super happy to be able to talk to you about all this stuff.

Terrific. Terrific. I'm happy as well.

Great. So the first, I thought, you know, it'd be interesting just to start with you in your own experience as a learner and just, you know, just hear a little bit about Roger from a kind of more of a personal perspective before we start getting into some of your big ideas. But I just wondered, yeah, what's your relationship with learning somehow? And, you know, obviously in different educator positions that you've had over the years and working with business leaders, etc. But for you and learning, what's, What's that relationship like?

Well, you know, I guess I, I consider myself fortunate that I came from a background that afforded me a decent amount of education, though on the surface you wouldn't have thought it. So I grew up in a, a town of, well, a village of 50 people. My father went to high school and then became an entrepreneur, and my mother was an elementary school teacher until she had my older brother and myself, and then she stopped. And, um, in those days you didn't go to university to be an elementary school teacher. So neither of them nor their parents had been to university. So I didn't come from some kind of like highly academic background.

Yeah.

But my dad, who again was, you know, largely uneducated, entrepreneur would always answer my questions really thoroughly. So I would ask him all sorts of questions about the business. Why do you do this, Dad? Why do you do that? And he would, he would always, he would start it out with, well, Roger, and then go on to give me a thorough answer. And the answers were always really interesting and intriguing. Just a little, for example, he had a policy. So he started an animal feed manufacturing business. So we were in a rural area and the farmers would buy feed for their animals, mainly chickens. Some hogs, some dairy. And he had a policy of every week there would be a price list with all the feeds and the prices. So it kind of feeds down one side, quantities. So if you bought a 100-pound bag versus a ton versus 10 tons, you'd get discounts, but it was all laid out on one piece of paper. And he never, under any circumstances at all, whatever, deviate from the price list. And these would be handed out to the farmers, so they were in circulation. And so I said, you know, Dad, it seems like your competitors could get that from a farmer and just look at your price list and underprice you somewhere. You know, wouldn't you want to respond and match? I remember him saying, well, Roger, he said, you could, but we've got the best cost position in the industry. So if any competitor underprices us for a given customer, they must be charging other of their customers way more. And so it's not our job to go after this customer who they are subsidizing with another customer. It's to go after that customer. And I said, but you know, that's still pretty common. Like, but why is this so important to you? And I, and he said, well, you know, we've got the highest feed quality, we've got the best service, we care for the farmers better than anybody else. I would like the sales call to be about that, about helping the farmer understand what we would do for them, the quality of the feed and all of that. If price is up for negotiation, the whole sales call is going to be about what price can I negotiate.

Yeah.

So this makes sure it's not— it's just, it's just not a negotiation. The only way they know it, it isn't a negotiation is if we never ever ever deviate from that price list.

Interesting.

So I'm like, okay, yeah, got that. And that's superior to the quality of the business education that I got at Harvard Business School. It's plain and simple. Like, Harvard Business School is a bit of a, like, you know, beloved alma mater and all that kind of stuff. But objectively speaking, I learned much more about business at the kitchen table than 2 years of Harvard Business School. And it isn't close. It's like 10 to 1 or something like that. And so the fact that he would explain things to me, uh, sort of encouraged me to be quizzical and try and figure stuff out. My mother, the elementary school teacher, was exactly the opposite, but I learned from this too. She would never answer any questions. I would always get back, well, what do you think? You know, Mom, Mom, I lost my Tonka truck. You know, I don't know where it is. She wouldn't go find it for me. She'd say, well, Roger, you know, can you think about the last time you had that truck in your hand? And I'd think really hard and say, well, I had it upstairs in my brother's bedroom. She said, are you sure that's the last time you had the truck in your hand? And then I'd think some more and think some more. Oh no, I took it down to the rec room and was playing with it there. And then she said, well, maybe that's a good place to look. And so, and she did this with everything. She would never provide answers. So it's funny. Dad provided answers to any question I would ask. Mom would never provide an answer to any damn question I would ask. But I learned from Mom, think it through. Think it through. You have the resources to think it through on your own. So I think they both encouraged me to be a learner in their own kind of natural ways, that's just the way they both thought about the world, they produced a good learning son.

Yeah, amazing. So you're just kind of swimming in the water of curiosity and immersion and questioning and all those great stuff.

Yeah, I was gonna say that the balancing act of your mom and dad is effectively the balancing act of being a design thinker, which is the first way in that I discovered you and your thinking when I was at a kitchen table starting Notosh very alone with two parents who were teachers and no one able to not that business savvy. Ah, but, um, I scoured online looking for every publication that was available around design thinking and discovered two books. Yours was one of them, uh, Design for Business, and I devoured it. My mother got it as a Christmas present and I devoured it. But that balancing act between your mother, effectively the critical thinker of the family, shall we say, and your father able to provide the intel that you have to take good decisions. And we call that immersion. And in your work in social entrepreneurship, you've talked about that as that period of understanding where you're going with kind of gut instinct and intuition. And where was it the last time you looked for it, Roger? And on the other hand, you're looking for the hard data that tells you this is a good position to be in, and then synthesizing that beautifully to find out a winning strategy, as it were. When you wrote that book though, you did use the word revolution to describe what was going on. You said that the business around about 2010 was in the midst of a design revolution. 14 years on, how would you reflect on this? Do you think the revolution has happened? Is it more of an evolution? Where do we sit in terms of the role of design in everything we do?

Yeah, it's probably more of an evolution than a revolution. And like many things that go through business, I mean, they sort of have a cycle and the cycle tends to be somebody relatively thoughtful kind of writes about something and it's got the kernel of a good idea in it that gets people interested enough. And so people start to do it. Some sort of are willing to pay the kind of the learning price to actually absorb it thoroughly. Like it sounds like you did, you like wrote, read everything and try to make sense of it. Others just say, wow, this is cool, let's go do it, you know, and I've spent 15 minutes on it and I'm now a design thinker. And I think a bunch of companies did that, a bunch of practitioners, people selling design thinking services. And so there's a certain amount of people getting disappointed because they say, well, we had a brainstorming and we put stickies on the wall and nothing good happened from it, therefore design thinking must suck kind of. So you get some of that. That having been said, I think being avowedly not customer-centric is now just a harder place to be, right? Like if you say, yeah, they, they don't know what they're talking about, we're smart, they're dumb, and that's our approach to business. Like there's not many people who would say, oh, I wanna invest in that company. So I think the general level of customer centricity has risen, I think you see more iterative prototyping, right, where people don't keep their things in labs for as long before they have them exposed to the people who are going to actually use them. And so I would say that that is an evolution.

I think that in schools, that the— it's really heartening, I think, to see so many schools and education systems really going above and beyond to look at the learner experience, the family experience at school.

Yes.

And design with, co-design with young people. And it's making a phenomenal difference. And I guess that's what matters about the ideas from, from that first brilliant book that you'd written. But Tim Logan and I have been fascinated by the Playing to Win. You know, it's a challenging book for educators though, Tim, as well.

Yeah, I mean, so just as a kind of general context for this, one of the things we find interesting is, and we've kind of alluded to some of it already, is that, you know, maybe some of those design thinking ideas have kind of embedded in business as usual within business and, you know, different industries, but still people in education are coming across design thinking now and thinking, wow, this is an amazing new tool. For some, for others it's been around for a while, but I think sometimes there's a tricky relationship between business and education and it's trying to take good ideas from wherever they come and kind of use them to enhance the learner experience and, you know, do all the things that we want to do in education. But that just the idea of playing to win is a challenging one in education because what does that mean really?

What does that mean? Yeah, no, it, if I'm, I'm probably kind of not terribly mainstream on this front, but I think playing to win is absolutely essential. In education and was utterly responsible for the success of the Rotman School, right? And what did winning mean for the Rotman School? So I took over the Rotman School in 1998. It was then the 4th best business school in Southern Ontario. And 15 years later, it's by far and away the best business school in Canada and the only one on the international map. It is, instead of bringing in 10% foreign students. It brings in 50% foreign students. It graduates almost 3 times as many students as it did in 1998. 70% of the foreign students stay in Ontario after graduation. So it's a huge influx of talent. They now have a world-class degree, not a regular degree. But then you should say, well, but then isn't that a zero-sum game? Well, no, that's a huge positive-sum game. And guess what? Because we did what we did, the former number one school, Ivey, had to massively upgrade its capabilities. Schulich, the number two, had to massively upgrade their capabilities. And so now Southern Ontario, Greater Toronto Area, is an MBA mecca where lots and lots of students think of it as the place to be. How did that happen? If we would have played to play, rather than saying we're going to play to win. And winning for us— I, I made this statement and people hated me for saying it— I couldn't care less how I actually rank in Canada.

I—

Canada needs one globally relevant business school and we're going to make it at Toronto. It's setting that as the aspiration and then figuring out where to play, how to win, that would deliver that. And I just generally believe Winning means finding a place where you're going to deliver exceptional value, which encourages other people to find other places to create exceptional value, right? It doesn't mean crushing other people. It means encouraging dispersion. And when you encourage a dispersion of where to play, how to win, customers do better because there was Rotman School, perfect school for any MBA. No, not at all. But for a segment, an important segment, it was. So I've actually, I did strategy for, you know, Adam Grant, friend of mine, did strategy for his daughter's school as a favor to him. And it's a, I think it was a school that went up, up to like a grade 9 or so. It didn't have teenagers and then they were kids at the time. And I, and I just say, well, you have to stand for something and, and have people want to come to you because you stand for that and other people are going to stand for other things and they're going win too. So there isn't just one winner. So I, I applied 100% to education.

But I think I would say that's one of the things that people in education find challenging is to identify what is that thing that they're going to stand for. Because when you've got such a diversity of young people in your school and you've got, you know, got diversity of educators, you've got different demographics of families, potentially everyone needs different things. And so this idea of kind of strategy of sacrifice, right? And, and actually honing in on one particular thing that you're gonna stand for, that's what schools and education systems often find really challenging because they're thinking, what about all this other stuff that I think I should be doing?

In my view, if that is in fact what you're facing, then your strategy should be, here's how we uniquely figure out how to serve the greatest level of diversity. And that's going to be the thing we're special at. Right? Right? I mean, like, I just don't buy it. Like, yeah, unfortunately, most people are crummy strategists. Most educators, like most, are like most people, and they're crummy strategists. And, you know, the world is full of them. I'm trying to make the world slightly less full of crummy strategists over time. That's my goal in some sense. But all of these are just weak-minded excuses. And, and they're the expression of lack of confidence. Here's our approach. Because we can't figure out what to do, we're gonna do a little bit of everything. Wow, great. You're gonna put yourself on the map, right?

When we've, we've taken those 5 choices to schools and we've been lucky, I think, in that, of course, the, the first schools that come in saying, hey, we really wanna do strategy differently, you're already winning because they're happy to, to sacrifice, they're happy to focus. And so you have these great examples. I think now we're working more with with what you might call mainstream schools. They're excellent schools. And one of the challenges is that winning for them has meant having great examination results, and they're all in that zero-sum game. They're all doing incredibly well at it, and they often perceive that talking about their aspiration— well, they say, well, we're already in our aspiration, we've, we've aspired, our aspiration has expired, we're, we're there. And they struggle to kind of see what the next one's going to be. Because they can't invent it. They feel someone else might have to invent it for them. And so it's been good fun challenging schools to say, no, no, you can invent the next thing that goes beyond simply getting good grades. But that's a creative act, maybe even more than what they perceive as a strategic planning act, which is a bit more boring and to do with spreadsheets. Yes.

No, I mean, I am slightly wistful about this. I mean, I should write a Playing to Win for the social sector, just like Jim Collins did Good to Great for the social sector, because there are some nuances that you have to take into account, especially kind of fundamentally charitable organizations. Like, most schools are not— they're nonprofits, they're not charities so much in the sense that people benefiting from the service pay for it, like any private, any private school. In the, in the purest charity, the beneficiaries are somebody other than the payers, right? So a Cancer Society or whatever goes out and, and fundraises to beat cancer so that other people, other than the ones that have given the money, benefit. And so you have to think about it. It's almost a modification of a two-sided market. And, and so you have to think about how can you define a strategy, a where to play, how to win, such that the people who are giving money to it see you as creating so much value for the beneficiaries that they care enough about to give, to give money for it, that they would want to give more money because that's what enables you to grow and do more. So they're winning in a charity organization is having a word to play that creates such value that that equation works for both. So there's some nuances to how you have to think about it, but the, the core principle of creating unique value is at the heart of it. And that's hard, right? It's hard. What's the easiest way to create value? Exactly the same way as everybody else. And then you'll be the 50th percentile player along with everybody else. And if that's your goal in life, you know, knock yourself out. It seems if you've got one life to live, I think I'd want to be in whatever I'm doing, a couple of standard deviations above the mean. Does that mean others are, are then not capable of doing that? No, they can do it in another way, in another field.

For school leaders, there's maybe something there where we talk about what's the winning aspiration for a school or for an education system. It's really closely linked to the personal aspiration of the leadership team in place as well. They have to want to do more than, as you put it, maintain and improve the extant system. They have to want to have a go at creating a new equilibrium, a new way of doing things.

But that, to me, there's almost no difference between that and a corporation, right? The only, the only corporate— do you think shareholders cause corporations to perform magnificently? No, unless it's a family that owns, so like a private company like LEGO. I work with LEGO and that's the Christiansen family and the family does want LEGO to be awesome. But in the usual widely held publicly traded company. No, the only ones that do well have a leader who says, eh, you know, being average isn't good enough. You know, yes, I'm, I'm the CEO of a whatever Fortune 50 company or a Fortune 100 company. That means I make $10, $15, $20 million a year by being mediocre, totally mediocre. And so I can, I can golf, smoke cigars, drink cognac. And then maybe you'll get fired 5 years later, but you've accumulated a couple hundred million in the meantime and you're fine. It all has to be intrinsic motivation. It's like, no, I want to be remembered for, like A.G. Lafley, I want to be remembered for really advancing P&G and the mission of P&G to make the world a better place and to leave it better than when I left it. And he, like many of the really good CEOs say, it doesn't matter what they pay me, the compensation committee can say whatever the hell they want. It's more than I ever dreamed I was going to make growing up. And I don't even know what to do with all the money other than give it away. So you figure that out. So they're completely unmotivated by the economics of it, like completely, utterly. I can promise you that all the good CEOs I've met have like almost a scarily kind of laissez-faire attitude about what they make, but they've got something else on their mind, and that is having a great institution and leaving it better than, than when they took over.

Yeah, just in relation to what you were saying about Ontario and your, you know, the way that Rotman affected the general ecosystem around, I think that's also a really important part of this is that that idea of win, you know, it sticks in the throat of an educator sometimes of, you know, if I'm winning, someone else is losing. But I think that's a really interesting perspective on it is that actually by winning and being better at the thing that you care about, that is your mission to do, you know, it's like a rising tide, all boats rise or whatever the saying is, right? You know, everyone is kind of put on their game, their best game, and it creates an opportunity for everyone to just for better outcome, better impact for all of the young people in the system, let's say, right?

Absolutely. Like I have zero doubt whatsoever that my 15 years in leadership position there has made the Ontario business education system dramatically better to the benefit of employers in, in Canada, students in Canada, the economic development of the province of Ontario. It's irrefutable, in fact. And the only losers in it are— is the business school that was number one and spending decades resting on its laurels may never, even though that never is a long time, but at least not in the foreseeable future, have that lofty status. But am I crying myself to sleep at night over that? No. We should have had no chance of doing what we did if they were minding their business. Yeah. And so do you leave somebody there not minding their business, not serving the students, the corporations, the province of Ontario well, and you let them be because you don't want to play to win. I don't see how that's good for society. I think I was good for society. And that may sound arrogant, I don't know, but we just worked hard with this positive-sum game in mind. And I don't think anybody at Ivy or Schulich or Queen's could possibly argue that they are absolutely worse off now than they were there. Because when the government saw what we were up to, they funneled more money into the sector and whatever. They will say they're relatively worse off, but there's no possible argument that they are absolutely worse off, or their students are absolutely worse off, or the province is absolutely worse off, or families or businesses or, or anybody. But that's the expansive view that you have. If you want to be a good strategist, a good strategist doesn't spend their time on bloody fighting forever with a competitor. A great strategist figures out how to say, We're going here, you go there, we're, we're gonna make it better for everybody and expand the market.

Yeah.

Can you like stop competing entirely? No. But I think of it like Venn diagrams, right? If the Venn diagrams are completely overlapping between competitors, it's just bloody and it's not good for anybody. If you can make the Venn diagrams overlap 20%, then you're gonna serve more customers well, right? Because I'm serving my customers over here super well. A bunch of those customers aren't served at all by you because you've chosen to serve in a different way. And so we're serving more customers well and both making enough returns to invest in getting better, serving customers even better in the future. That's a great strategist, not somebody who, you know, kind of beats the crap out of the competitors.

Yeah.

Right. And, you know, Sun Tzu, Art of War. I mean, He said that 1,000 years ago, right? The best kind of battle is not battling.

And then just to kind of maybe thread the needle through some of the things we've already spoken about, the organization resting on its laurels is not learning and they're not gonna move and respond as they need to adapt to changing conditions, right? And you're kind of your mom questioning your dad with the answers. There's this curiosity, that kind of learning disposition that you develop. You've gotta retain that, right? And then, so, and then just to, as a segue into the, to the next question I'd love to ask you, you kind of model that learning disposition in the way you blog and the way you kind of reach out and connect with, you know, your network. And just wanted to ask you if, for you to reflect on what, by doing that and kind of maintaining that learning disposition, obviously it makes you a great strategist, but what have you also kind of, have you been given pause to reflect on or change, or if you were writing the 5 questions again now, would, you know, What have you learned from that process of engaging?

Well, I learn a whole lot. I mean, it's great to do. I mean, I think the fundamental kind of reason for doing it is, I mean, I was raised to think about making a contribution. And so I want to make a contribution. And so that's my contribution. And everybody says, why doesn't you make this a subscription thing and for money and all that? And I'm just like, you don't understand me. But the payoff to me is, is great, right? Which is really good questions. You know, if you read my Medium posts, probably, I don't know, a quarter of them are responses to people writing in saying, what, hey, you know, why don't you write about this? Because I'd be really interested. The majority of them are actually from working with clients. And when I see them struggling with something, asking a question, when I see something that I I give them as advice, I always ask myself, have I written about this? Because if I'm giving advice and I haven't written about it, then it has very local benefit, right? That executive in that room at that company at that time. If I can abstract from it and write about it, it has the promise of reaching many more people. And if it's a useful insight, then I've made a contribution, a bigger contribution. So that's sort of how the machine works, if you will.

Writing like that must also— it's a way of also thinking through and maybe also changing your own mind about some of the things you put in print in that beautiful green-yellow neon book. Is there a particular point that you've picked up on, you think, ah, I'd love to rewrite that chapter and splice the pages out and put it back in?

To be honest, not really. What you'll notice from the book to now is I call capabilities must-have capabilities and management systems enabling management systems. So I've, I've sort of learned ways to describe it and the like. But no, I haven't come to the epiphany on the 5 boxes. But if you go to the strategic choice structuring process, I've changed the boxes on that. So the boxes there are, you know, you start with a problem and then you frame a choice possibilities, ask what would have to be true, figure out the barriers to choice, figure out tests, and decide. Okay. So that was, that was it. As I thought more about the linkages of design and business, what I said is that second one, frame of choice, should be something more generative and positive. So you start with a problem. I want to start with, here's a gap between what we wish were happening and what is. So that motivates us to make a choice. But I like the design thinking, how might we question. So the second box is now frame of how might we question. Which I think is more inspirational for the possibilities generation. And then the testing box is testing and transformation. Because when I conceptualized that methodology, which was back in the early '90s, and that's what people don't realize, in 2013, I just wrote up what I had created between 1987 and 1995. But what I sort of both learned from design and when I started getting more into the application of Aristotle to my, to my work, it was that you have to be open to the possibility that what would have to be true definitively is not, but you can map out a credible plan for making it true, right? Do people type on glass? No. Can you get them to? Well, turns out you can. And $200 billion a year of sales later, that was sort of important to not say no, they type on little QWERTY physical keyboards. So now that's testing and transformation. It's sort of, as I got deeper into Aristotle, it's like the original great thinker was thinking similar things, not in business, but the original design thinker. Yeah. Well, there's, there's some truth to that. And I mean, he's a man after my own heart, right? In some sense, right? Because he was listening to Socrates and Plato, who are the great theoreticians and like the real world doesn't matter. Customers, who cares? It's, it's us super intelligent elite people who have to make the decisions. For all these morons out there. And even though he was their student, he was very much, oh no, no, no, no, no, it has to sort of practically work and you actually have to interact with people. And so he's sort of my ancient hero. My less ancient hero is Peter Drucker, who is also the same in the sense that, you know, he would say to people who had a meeting with him and, oh, that was a great meeting, Peter. Thank you. Thank you. And he'd say, don't tell me you had a great meeting. Tell me what you're going to do different Monday morning. Right? So the epitome of practical application of concepts.

That's great stuff. And then just, I'm just conscious of time, but I'd love to ask you, because the social entrepreneurship piece as well, I think is also really fascinating and we've been discussing it a lot. I know schools are kind of coming up against these kinds of issues of real, you know, how do we make learning more relevant? How do we engage young people in real world problems? And, you know, it kind of goes back to some of the design thinking stuff as well, but I think I think there's also this multiple challenges as we see around the world and trying to engage young people in that idea of action and just thinking about how do we inspire young people in, into action and service and different ideas around that. And the work you've done with Sally Osberg, I know you've kind of really committed to supporting educators in building out curriculum and how do you teach this stuff. So I, yeah, I wanted to just invite you to reflect a little bit about since, since writing that book and, you know, where would you like to see that have an Well, a couple things strike me.

One, one is if you're interested, you ought to have Josie Fung on this. So she runs the iThink Institute and what we've really focused on is building the kids' skills in real-world problem solving. So we've moved now to a model where we create a challenge kit on a given subject. That's where there's sort of a kind of what appears to be an either-or choice that has people stuck and a teacher uses it as the material to to teach kids sort of this integrative thinking process to creating solutions to what seem like insoluble problems. And, and there are, I don't know what, hundreds of schools now in Ontario that are using these challenge kits. So what, what I've been encouraging on that front as the chair founder of it is to think about the power of HBS cases. So Harvard Business School writes all of these cases and people don't realize, I mean, the notion is, well, Harvard Business School uses the case method and nobody else does. Not true. Like probably 30% of all classes taught in MBA programs, the professor utilizes an HBS case. So they may be at Wharton and they're teaching finance, but then they leave in an HBS case for this or marketing for it. Why is it so widespread? Well, it makes the job of the professor easy to get a point across, right? And it provides a classroom experience that's exciting, right? And so I've said, we need to put in the hands of teachers a dead easy way to teach this relatively complicated stuff for which they aren't prepared at all. So, so teachers colleges, you know, undergrads and masters in education have nothing, zero in them about integrative thinking or real-world problem solving, like nothing. And so they aren't trained for that. So we'll create it, make it easy. This is the easy button to be able to do that, which is only fair. I'm not sort of pandering to those teachers. It's like they haven't been taught that. They've been taught to teach other things. We need to provide them with a vehicle for, for helping teach that set of skills. Which we've defined as real-world problem solving. And that seems to resonate as, yeah, we want to teach that. So that's where we're heading with it. And, uh, you know, I, I'm encouraged. It's hard when you have an entire institution, you know, K through 12 education has an infrastructure where teachers get taught a certain set of stuff that they're supposed to teach. Adding anything to that is really hard.

Yeah, and that's, I mean, we see that all the time, stuffed full curricula and actually the things that we're talking about, they need a bit of space to be fostered and developed in classroom experiences that, you know, it's not this drill and kill kind of efficiency of like, let's just chuck a load of content. It's a very different, much richer experience, but it does need space and a bit of time.

Yeah, I'm sort of fearful. This is what I say about the MBA. I tried for 15 years to to break apart that iron cage of here's the things that make up an MBA. And I wish I could say I had greater success than I, I did. And I've come to believe that, that it has to be outside. You got to go to business school, get the 3 letters, because those 3 letters are very precious. There's half or 3/4 of the stuff you learn in there that it has very little utility to you in the rest of your life, but it's the hazing ritual to get the 3 letters. And then you got to go get education on the that matter.

Yeah.

Do you know that one quarter of graduate degrees in America are an MBA? One quarter. It's a monstrous infrastructure, just huge educational infrastructure, and it'll last a long time and it doesn't have enough pressure on it to be more responsive to what's needed by society and the markets. And so you'd have to build up something that's an alternative for the people who find that not satisfactory.

I think it's building up a real sense of what lifelong learning means. It's kind of hard to do real life learning in the confines of a classroom. Real life learning happens in real life.

Yeah. And for that, I'm, I'm like, so one of my other heroes, probably Aristotle Drucker, uh, Chris Argyris and his longtime writing and research partner Don Schern. And I would recommend to anybody the Reflective Practitioner. Brilliant book because you can either go through life just doing it or you can go through life doing it and reflecting on it. And if anybody were to really want to say what's— to whatever extent I've had any success, what's the number one correlator to that? It's being a reflective practitioner. I practice and then reflect on it. And you'd be amazed how many mega smart people don't reflect at all on their practice. And I got a little example I'll give you. It's like Mark Fuller was the CEO of Monitor, put me in charge of all sort of ideas, development, R&D, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And one of the things I did is, is I instituted a system whereby when you came off of a case, at the end of a case, what I wanted from you is a one-pager on what is one interesting thing I learned on this case.

Nice.

You say nice, but do you know what the compliance with that was? Somewhere between 2% and 5%, depending on how you measure it.

What's the point? Yeah.

They just wanted to go on. Like these were Harvard MBAs, Stanford MBAs, Wharton MBAs, Williams, Amherst, Middlebury, Swarthmore undergrads, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, blah, blah, blah. They were the smartest people that you could find. So it wasn't an intelligence question. They were as intelligent as it gets. But less than 5% of them were willing to spend a couple of hours sitting back and reflecting on what they'd just done for the last 6 months of their life. Like, it was unimaginable to me, but it was a lesson. Yeah, which is there are very few reflective practitioners in the world, very few. And it is not correlated with intelligence.

They obviously didn't grow up with your mum.

Yes, they did not. They did not.

Yeah.

And maybe I had this special background that made me into it. It just seems so obvious that wouldn't you want to get better?

That's where the learning happens, right? That is where the learning happens. You know, the learning doesn't happen necessarily in the experience. It happens in the reflection on the experience.

That, Tim, that is, you know, bang on. That is precisely it. And writing has a profound implication on— it's an accelerator to that. So I would argue that if you just sat down and meditated on it, that would be an advantage. But writing it down, you look at it and can say, is that actually entirely really representative of what happened, or is it sort of? And here's another way to think about it. So I'm going to edit it and edit it, and, and that then it sconces the learning more in your head through that, through that process.

Process.

And that's one of the real threats of ChatGPT, actually. It's not about production and, you know, all of this other stuff. It's actually about removing the perception of the need for exactly that process that you're talking about, that deep process of reflection and iteration of ideas. And, but that's a whole nother conversation.

No, no, no, but it's— but it— but it— you're, you're absolutely right. It's closely related. And it's— because I was gonna rue the loss of writing, that writing is a lost art And, yeah, I mean, I'm trying not to hyperventilate about ChatGPT, but it's, I mean, it doesn't gainsay your point. If enough people are hyped about it, they'll say, great, this very difficult thing that I need to do writing, I can get somebody else to do for me, and then they'll never experience the learning and the honing of their ideas. I got this great piece of advice. One of the greatest pieces of advice I ever got in my life is from Bernie Avishai, who is a famous Harvard Business School senior editor who left and came to work for me at Monitor Company because we were trying to publish more and we needed somebody who's good at that. And I was complaining to Bernie one day and saying, Bernie, Bernie, I wanna be like you someday. Like I have to write and then edit and edit and edit and edit. And I wanna be like you where I can just write. I'm such a good writer. I can just write it and it's done.? And he laughed at me. He was about 10 years older than me, I think, and so he treated me like a kid, not unfairly. And he said, you undoubtedly suffer from a delusion. You believe that you think in order to write. And I'm like, duh, of course you think in order to write. And he said, nope, you write in order to think. And I'm like, I'm sitting there like gobsmacked. What the hell is Bernie talking about? He said, there's only so much thinking you can do in your head until you max out on further processing it. And the only way to really process your thinking is to write it down, then look at it and say, well, no, no, no, I didn't quite mean that. No, no, that's not the order I thought about it. And you edit, right? And that editing process is thinking. And so he said, you think editing is a bug, right? Because you haven't written it right, you have to edit it, that it's a feature, not a bug.

Nice.

Love that. So, so it's a feature of an excellent thinking process is editing. And so when you read my Medium pieces, they've all been edited, I would say, even when I'm busy, maybe 20 times. Wow. Because I just go through, go through and say, no, no, that's not quite the right word. No, that's not the right connotation. What could another example be? Like, it's all, it's all writing to give me access to be able to think more, better, more precisely. So if that disappears to your ChatGPT point, Tim Logan. If that art disappears, we will be disabling people from thinking and then the machines will take over, right?

Yeah.

Like if, if we act in a way that causes us to be stupid or considerably less smart, considerably less insightful, then it's gonna close the gap.

Absolutely right. It's not a new insight though, right? Amusing ourselves to death. Neil Postman. This is, you know, no, fascinating. Oh, this is good stuff. Thank you so much, Roger. I just wanna honor your time, but thank you so much for taking the time to be with us. It's so interesting. Thank you.

Terrific, terrific. Well, it was a pleasure. Good, good questions, good thoughts.

Thank you.

Take care. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us on our blog or on social media, or within your own networks.